Search results for ""Medieval Institute Publications""

The two texts of the Dialogue presented here, a Latin version printed ca. 1488 and a Middle English translation printed in 1492, preserve lively, entertaining, and revealing exchanges between the Old Testament wisdom figure Solomon and Marcolf, a medieval peasant who is ragged and foul-mouthed but quick-witted and verbally astute. The Dialogue was a best-seller of its day; Latin versions survive in some twenty-seven manuscripts and forty-nine early printed editions and the work was translated into a wide variety of late medieval vernaculars, including German, Dutch, Swedish, Italian, English, and Welsh.

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Anglo-Saxon England was a society governed by the competing discourses of illness, spirituality, power, and community. The concepts of demon possession and exorcism, introduced by Christian missionaries, provided a potential outlet for expressing the psychological, biological, and sociopolitical dysfunctions of a society that was at the center of multiple conflicting cultural dimensions.Demon Possession in Anglo-Saxon England is a reexamination of the available sources describing the possessed and a study of the currently recognized medical and psychiatric conditions that may be relevant to and resemble medieval possession.

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The complete text of John Gower's Confessio Amantis is a three-volume edition, including all Latin components - with translations - of this bilingual poem and extensive glosses, bibliography, and explanatory notes. Volume 2 contains Books 2, 3, and 4, which follow in their structure the outline of Vice and its children found in the early French poem the Mirour de l'Omme.

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This work-a parallel-text edition that contains all four versions of Piers Plowman-constitutes a major enterprise of textual scholarship and will provide for students of Langland a modern equivalent to Skeat's standard edition of 1886. This revised and corrected three-volume set is specifically designed to facilitate study of the parallel text (Volume I, second edition) alongside both the textual notes (Volume II, part 1, revised edition) and the commentary/glossary (Volume II, part 2, revised edition), and is intended to make the entire edition available to as many students of Langland as possible.

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This sourcebook presents editions and translations of seven fourteenth- and fifteenth-century texts that advance our understanding of gender, sexuality, and class in the late medieval German-speaking world. Three of the translated texts are fiction. Additionally, there is a religious treatise, a religious legend, an inventory of books, and a legal document. While each of these texts is instructive in and of itself, they gain in complexity when brought into dialogue with one another.

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The essays examine Audelay's biography, his self-representation as the maker of his book, and the specific parts of that book, from the poems and colophons found in The Counsel of Conscience to the salutations and carols that follow in the manuscript, concluding with a defense of Audelay's authorship of Three Dead Kings and Fein's own study of the multiple endings of the Audelay Manuscript. The scholarly work gathered in this collection allows John the Blind Audelay to take his rightful place among his peers in early fifteenth-century English literature.

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Audelay's idiosyncratic devotional tastes, interesting personal life history, and declared political affiliations-loyalty to king, upholder of estates, anxiety over heresy-make him worthy of careful study beside his better-known contemporaries. Of particular note: MS Douce 302 preserves Audelay's own alliterative Marcolf and Solomon, a poem thought to be descended from Langland's Piers Plowman. The Audelay Manuscript also contains unique copies of other alliterative poems of the ornate style seen in Gawain and the Green Knight and The Pistel of Swete Susan. These pieces are Paternoster and Three Dead Kings, both set at the end of the book. Whether or not they are Audelay's own compositions, they seem certain to be his own selections. Audelay also displays a persistent habit of sequencing materials in generic and devotionally affective ways. His is a pious sensibility delicately honed by reverence for the liturgy and by an awe of God. That Audelay's poetry can awaken us to new poetic sensitivities in medieval devotional verse is reason enough to bring him into the ambit of canonical fifteenth-century English poets.

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Composed in rhyming English verse, the Northern homily cycle is the earliest and most complete work of its kind (Gospel paraphrases with homilies on the theme of the Gospel texts), its widespread and enduring popularity witnessed by three distinct recensions and twenty surviving manuscripts ranging from the early fourteenth to the mid-fifteenth centuries. The collection was intended to accompany the Gospel lessons that were read every Sunday as part of the mass.

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This volume presents a unique collection of Middle English romances, each with a different view of society. One of the oldest English romances, Floris and Blancheflour, presents a tale of oriental wonders: a harem, an emir who never lacks a wife, eunuchs, and a garden housing a magical tree and spring. Sir Degrevant relates a tale of country nobility and marriage between the low and high ranks, while realistically illustrating their status and the ever-present issues of love and battle; The Squire of Low Degree is a poem about social mobility and the difference between reputation and wealth. The Tournament of Tottenham and its likely continuation, The Feast of Tottenham, are excellent examples of burlesque where "the humor is inescapable: the bumpkin heroes in their stuffed sheepskins fighting with flails for the reeve's daughter, who is watching them with her pet hen on her lap, are a spectacle not easily forgotten." - from the Introduction

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Faced with death's certainty-and the uncertainty of the time of its coming, particularly in a historical period of widespread plague and other afflictions-as well as the inevitability of the hereafter, what is one to do? Everyman speaks to this dilemma. . . . The protagonist is one who, because he has laid up treasures on earth, has been in a position to do good deeds, but he has been very lax about it and instead has pursued enjoyment and wealth, the latter hoarded instead of being shared with the poor and needy. . . . Now he must, as the medieval mystics knew, endure the solitariness of leaving behind all that has given him comfort in this world. . . . This facing page translation of this Continental play will be useful to all students of theater.

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It would not be an exaggeration to observe that in the last two decades Gower studies have developed in response to a widening appreciation of his poetry. On John Gower: Essays at the Millennium represents the third volume of essays originating from sessions of the John Gower Society at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Michigan. The contributions here and in the previous volumes provide insight into the shifts and trends in Gower studies over time. This collection offers a vibrant and fresh view of the field of Gower studies today, making it and its companion volumes an essential set for Gower scholars.

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Readers have noticed that the fifteenth century saw a remarkable flourishing of poems written in conditions of physical captivity or on the subject of imprisonment. The largest body of this poetry is from the pen of Charles of Valois, duke of Orléans, who was captured by the English at the battle of Agincourt in 1415 and not released until 1440. The longest single poem on the subject is James I of Scotland's The Kingis Quair, purportedly written at the time of his release from an eighteen-year imprisonment in England. This volume reflects the wide scope of these "prison poems" by bringing together a new edition of The Kingis Quair, a selection from Charles d'Orléans' Fortunes Stabilnes, a poem by George Ashby, who was imprisoned in London's Fleet prison, and the poems of two other poets, both anonymous, who wrote about physical and/or emotional imprisonment.

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"On several counts, one particular collection of French lyrics made in France in the late fourteenth century, University of Pennsylvania MS 15, is the most likely repository of Chaucer's French poems. It is the largest manuscript anthology extant of fourteenth-century French lyrics in the formes fixes (balade, rondeaux, virelay, lay, and five-stanza chanson) with by far the largest number of works of unknown authorship. The known authors represented in the manuscript and the texts themselves have notable associations with England and with Chaucer. And intriguingly there are fifteen lyrics each headed by the initials "Ch," very likely indications of authorship, neatly inserted between rubric and text. . . . [The] rubrics, together with other substantial manuscript evidence and the intrinsic worth of the poems, make them easily the best candidates among extant French lyrics for Chaucer's authorship, appropriate representatives of his French work." - from the Introduction

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The volume represents the second part of Rosenthal's cataloging of historical scholarship on Ricardian, Lancastrian, and Yorkist England, covering categories from political and legal history to social and intellectual history and the arts. As Rosenthal notes in the introduction, its size (1,888 entries for the decade) "hardly gives much support to those who warn us of the imminent demise of the more traditional lines of historical endeavor and inquiry."

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This volume offers readers a revised and considerably expanded version of the first Regular Life, edited by McMillan and Kathryn Smith Fladenmuller in 1997. As the editors note in their introduction, "The purpose of this book is to introduce the reader to the Rules of life of the major religious orders within the monastic, canonical, and mendicant traditions." Included are admonitions on and examples of the various forms of regular life by Antony, Syncletica, Pachomius, Basil, Cassian, Augustine, Caesarius of Arles, Benedict of Nursia, Columbanus, and Benedict of Aniane, plus selections from Rules for Cluniacs, Carthusians, Cistercians, the Knights Templar, the Hospitallers, and the followers of Saints Francis, Clare, and Dominic.

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Ancrene Wisse or the Anchoresses Guide (Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402), written sometime roughly between 1225 and 1240, represents a revision of an earlier work, usually called the Ancrene Riwle or Anchorites' Rule, a book of religious instruction for three lay women of noble birth.

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This volume presents excerpts and translations in parallel-text of three thirteenth-century South German verse chronicles: Rudolf von Ems's Weltchronik, the anonymous Christherre-Chronik, and the Weltchronik of Jans Enikel. These three works are close in language, in date, and in conception, yet they also differ significantly, representing the perspectives of three distinct sections of medieval society: courtly, monastic, and urban. The excerpts have been chosen from the beginning of Rudolf's chronicle, the middle of the Christherre-Chronik and the end of Enikel, so that taken together they give something of an impression of the chroniclers' arrangement of material in a continuum from the beginning to the end of history.

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Middle English Legends of Women Saints presents a collection of saints' Lives intended to suggest the diversity of possibilities beneath the supposedly fixed and predictable surfaces of the legends, using multiple retellings of the same legend to illustrate that medieval readers and listeners did not just passively receive saints' legends but continually and actively appropriated them. The collection opens with legends about two royal (or supposedly royal) women, Frideswide and Mary Magdelen, and continues with those of three popular virgin martyrs, Margaret of Antioch, Christina of Tyre, and Katherine of Alexandria. The final portion of the collection is devoted to St. Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary. The collection includes a number of relatively unknown texts that have not appeared in print since Horstmann's transcriptions in the nineteenth century and a few that have never before been published.

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Cotton Claudius B.iv, an illustrated Old English Hexateuch that is among the treasures of the British Library, contains one of the first extended projects of translation of the Bible in a European vernacular. Its over four hundred images make it one of the most extensively illustrated books to survive from the early Middle Ages and preserve evidence of the creativity of the Anglo-Saxon artist and his knowledge of other important early medieval picture cycles. In addition, the manuscript contains the earliest copy of Ælfric’s Preface to Genesis, a work that discusses issues of translation and interpretation.

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The eight essays in The Recovery of Old English consider major aspects of the progress of Anglo-Saxon studies from their Tudor beginnings until their coming of age in the second half of the seventeenth century.

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Through its contextualizing introduction, notes, and gloss, this classroom-friendly edition of Middle English lyric poetry makes the wide variety of Marian poems available to students of all levels. The poems selected for this volume provide a sampling of the rich tradition of Marian devotion as expressed in Middle English. They range widely in form, tone, and aesthetic quality in how they relate the iconic moments from Mary's life—the Annunciation, Nativity, and her experience of Christ's passion, for instance—as well as in their variety of praises for the Queen of Heaven. Taken together, the poems express the full range of a people's effort to voice anxieties and joys through Mary. This collection will spark an excellent discussion on English spirituality, Marian devotion, and Middle English lyrical poetry.

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ROMARD is an academic journal devoted to the study and promotion of Medieval and Renaissance drama in Europe. Previously published under the title of Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama (RORD), the journal has been in publication since 1956. ROMARD is published annually at the University of Western Ontario.

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The radical Protestantism that led to the suppression of religious drama in England also by the early years of Queen Elizabeth I destroyed perhaps the majority of ecclesiastical art in the country. The essays in this book provide analysis of the intellectual and religious motivation as well as new historical information concerning this phase of iconoclasm.

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At no time in the history of the West has translation played a more vital role than in the Middle Ages. Centuries before the appearance of the first extant vernacular documents, bilingualism, and preferably trilingualism, was a necessity in the scriptorium and chancery; and since the emergence of Romance had rendered the entire corpus of classical literature incomprehensible to all but the literati, both old and new worlds awaited (re)discovery or, to use Jerome's metaphor, conquest. The diversity of medieval translation is illustrated, although not encompassed, by the diversity of chapters in the present volume. Authors treat the methods and reception of translators of vernacular to Latin and vernacular to vernacular, texts of a variety of genres and many different languages and periods. The collection will present a welcome offering of different scholarly approaches to the critical issue of medieval translators and their craft.

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Growing out of a symposium on the Fleury Playbook at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, this book includes essays from the symposium, as well as additional papers written by scholars whose specialties were not represented at the conference. Each essay covers a unique topic in the study of the Playbook, utilizing a diverse set of methodological tools and interdisciplinary approaches for subjects which have not heretofore received adequate scholarly attention. The topics at hand are each of significant interest to the field at large.

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In bringing together these papers, Archaeological Approaches to Medieval Europe demonstrates the need for active participation of different disciplines in formulating questions about and interpretations of material culture in the Middle Ages. It celebrates the coming of age of historical archaeology, of which medieval archaeology is a subdiscipline. The papers collected are striking for their diversity of approaches and subject matter. They reflect the spirit of an open area excavation where specialists from many disciplines with diverging methodologies meet and work side by side. No paper is specifically devoted to an excavation report, although the majority of contributors made use of data from such reports. The collection is intended primarily as a sampler, but a thematic unity emerges around the potential of archaeological approaches to contribute to a political ecology of the medieval period. The volume is an indispensable offering for archaeologists and historians of the Middle Ages seeking an appraisal of the state of the young discipline of medieval archaeology.

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This volume serves as an excellent introduction to the tradition of romances dealing with the matter of France-that is, Charlemagne and his Twelve Peers. Of the three groups of English Charlemagne romances, the Ferumbras group, the Otuel group, and detached romances, the editor has selected one of each: The Sultan of Babylon, The Siege of Milan, and The Tale of Ralph the Collier. This is a valuable introduction to Charlemagne romances and is accessible to beginners in Middle English because of contextualizing introductions and glosses for each text, as well as a helpful glossary.

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Included here are the texts, translations, musical transcriptions, and facsimiles of the Swedish music-dramas for Holy Week and Easter: Depositio, Elevatio, and Visitatio Sepulchri.

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Professor Palmer has systematically surveyed the art of the former West Riding of Yorkshire and has provided an iconographic index of this large region where medieval drama also flourished.

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A collection of wise and witty essays by some of our wisest and wittiest scholars in honor of one of our field's wisest wits.

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This book is the first critical edition of two fascinating but overlooked devotional texts. Each shines its own light on medieval faith. The Holkham Prayers and Meditations (ca.1410) is a rare example of female authorship, written by an unnamed woman to guide a "religious sustir." Simon Appulby's Fruyte of Redempcyon (1514) is more popular in aim, composed by one of England's last anchorites to serve his urban community. Both texts are accompanied by extensive notes and introductory essays to aid students and specialists alike.

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At the end of the fifteenth century, Gavin Douglas devised his ambitious dream vision The Palyce of Honour in part to signal a new scope to Scottish literary culture. While deeply versed in Chaucer's writings, Douglas identified Ovid's Metamorphoses as a particularly timely model in the light of contemporary humanist scholarship. For all its comedy, The Palyce of Honour stands as a reminder to James IV of Scotland that poetry casts a powerful light upon the arts of rule. A new edition of David Parkinson’s 1992 book The Palis of Honoure. Medieval Institute Publications at Western Michigan University publishes the TEAMS Middle English Texts series, which is designed to make available texts that occupy an important place in the literary and cultural canon but have not been readily obtainable in student editions. The focus of Middle English Texts is on Middle English literature adjacent to such major authors as Chaucer or Malory. The editions include glosses of difficult words and short introductions on the history of the work, its merits, points of topical interest and brief bibliographies.

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Three lectures, initially presented before the University of Cambridge and now collected here, examine Matthew Parker as a noted collector of books, an avid annotator, and a keen student of Old English. In these lectures Dr. Page assesses the evidence for Parker's use of his manuscripts and printed books by drawing upon varied sources, including Parker's very numerous annotations upon their pages, and surveys the archbishop's role in the early-modern rediscovery and recovery of Old English and other medieval sources. Plates accompany the text to illustrate many characteristic aspects of Parker's interventions in his books.

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Beginning in 1987, the yearbook was the preeminent venue for scholarship on "Piers Plowman"; on related poems in the tradition of didactic alliterative verse and on the historical, religious, and intellectual contexts in which such poems were produced in late medieval England. Each volume contains essays, reviews and an annotated bibliography.

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In a series of essays readers will find information about modern scholarship on the subject of chivalry and various suggestions for ways to teach some familiar and unfamiliar chivalric materials. Short bibliographies are provided for teachers' further use.

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The disparate texts in this anthology, produced in England between the late thirteenth and the early sixteenth centuries, challenge, and in some cases parody and satirize, the institution of marriage. In so doing, according to the Introduction, they allow us to interrogate the traditional assumptions that shape the idea of the medieval household. The trials of marriage seem to outweigh its joys at times and, as some of these texts suggest, maintaining a sense of humor in the face of what must have been great difficulty could have been no easy task. The texts bridge generic categories. Some are obscure, written by anonymous authors; others are familiar, written by the likes of John Lydgate, John Wyclif, and William Dunbar. Taken together they suggest that, despite the fact that marriage had become a sacrament in the twelfth century and was increasingly recognized by ecclesiastical and secular authorities as a valuable social institution, it was not always a stabilizing and orderly social force.

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Although it seemed in the mid-1970s that the study of the troubadours and of Occitan literature had reached a sort of zenith, it has since become apparent that this moment was merely a plateau from which an intensive renewal was being launched. In this new bibliographic guide to Occitan and troubadour literature, Robert Taylor provides a definitive survey of the field of Occitan literary studies - from the earliest enigmatic texts to the fifteenth-century works of Occitano-Catalan poet Jordi de Sant Jordi - and treats over two thousand recent books and articles with full annotations. Taylor includes articles on related topics such as practical approaches to the language of the troubadours and the musicology of select troubadour songs, as well as articles situated within sociology, religious history, critical methodology, and psychoanalytical analysis. Each listing offers descriptive comments on the scholarly contribution of each source to Occitan literature, with remarks on striking or controversial content, and numerous cross-references that identify complementary studies and differing opinions. Taylor's painstaking attention to detail and broad knowledge of the field ensure that this guide will become the essential source for Occitan literary studies worldwide.

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In this new edition of the poems of Robert Henryson, David Parkinson offers editions of Henryson's "Fables," "The Testament of Cresseid," "Orpheus and Eurydice" and twelve shorter poems, grouped according to the strength of their attribution to Henryson, as well as the glosses and explanatory and textual notes characteristic of Middle English Texts Series volumes. Henryson was a prominent Scottish poet writing in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century. This edition serves as an excellent addition to the Scots language and late medieval Scottish poetry.

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The first of two volumes dedicated to the memory of Paul Remy and having as theme the scientific domain to which he had dedicated his research for nearly forty years: the Occitan literature and language.

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The Play of Daniel from Beauvais was the first medieval music-drama to be staged in a popular modern production by the legendary Noah Greenberg's New York Pro Musica. This book provides for the first time a critical introduction to the staging and production, music, and setting of the play in its architectural and historical context. It also reproduces the pages in the manuscript which contain the play in facsimile, and it provides a new and faithful transcription of the music as well as a fresh translation of the text by A. Marcel J. Zijlstra of the Schola Cantorum "Quem Quaeritis" of the Netherlands, a group which performs regularly at the Utrecht Festival.

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Translation and the Transmission of Culture between 1300 and 1600 is a companion volume to Medieval Translators and their Craft (1989) and, like Medieval Translators, its aim is to provide the modern reader with a deeper understanding of the early centuries of translation in France. This collection works from the premise that translation never was, and should not now be, envisaged as a genre. Translatio was and continues to be infinitely variable, generating a correspondingly variable range of products from imitatively creative poetry to treatises of science. In the exercise of its multi-faceted set of practices the same controversies occurred then as now: creation or replication? Literality or freedom? Obligation to source or obligation to public? For this reason, the editors avoided periodization, but the volume makes no pretense at temporal exhaustiveness-the subject of translation is too vast. The contributors do, however, aim to shed light on several aspects of translation that have hitherto been neglected and that, despite the earliness of the period, have relevance to our understanding of translation whether in France or generally. Like its companion, this collection will be of interest to scholars of translation, textual studies, and medieval transmission of texts.

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The material contained here derives from a wide variety of printed and manuscript sources, chosen to give some idea of the rich diversity of evidence available to the historian of English medicine and its place in society during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries. Latin and French have been translated into modern English, while vernacular texts have been slightly modified, and obsolete or difficult words explained. Middle English has otherwise been retained to give the past an authentic voice and to emphasize the similarities as well as the differences between the experience of modern readers and that of the inhabitants of late medieval England

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Studies of late medieval Tuscany have traditionally relied on historiographical premises derived from the experience of its intensely investigated capital city. Specifically, normative and quantitative data from Florentine sources have been employed to chart demographic, social, and economic trends during the communal age and across the period of the Black Death and its aftermath. The results have invited instructive comparisons with other regions of Italy, as well as other parts of Europe. At the same time, however, the focus on Florence in its role as a metropolitan center belies the conceptual problems inherent in the modern definition of “region,” applicable only with hindsight to medieval juridical and topographical boundaries. The essays in this volume offer non-Italian scholars a representative sample of current European research and a summary of recent debates regarding the historical evolution of those republics that posed the most formidable obstacles to the extension of Florentine hegemony. While they cover a range of topics, they all provide evidence of the important resources available to scholars working in provincial Tuscan archives and the volume offers an excellent sampling of the state of scholarship on these Italian communities.

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This collection of essays was released in honor of John Leyerle, a scholar to whom all medievalists in North America, and many beyond, owe a great debt. As a teacher, scholar, and administrator, Leyerle has been a leader in the rise and renewal of medieval studies on this continent in the past thirty years. The essays in this volume encompass his broad academic interests and interdisciplinary approach to scholarship, with a range of contributors from Canada, the United States, and abroad.

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Eighteen essays by some of the most prominent British and North American students of heroic poetry, plus two poems and a bibliography, are gathered here to honor Jess B. Bessinger Jr., whose innovative studies of heroic poetry have instructed a generation of scholars and whose performances of Anglo-Saxon poems are legendary.

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This volume is the first part of Rosenthal's cataloging of historical scholarship on Ricardian, Lancastrian, and Yorkist England, and covers categories from political and legal history to social and intellectual history and the arts. This volume is a must for any scholar of the period.

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It is fast becoming dogma that French prose emerged out of poetry by a process of deversification in the thirteenth century. Since the earliest extant example of written French prose dates back to the eighth century, this premise cannot be taken at face value. Prose had been the medium of the clercs for many centuries before the thirteenth. It had been honed by constant use to all manner of functions whether legal, diplomatic, epistolary, or edificatory (to name only those exemplified in this study). Early Prose in France is above all a reevaluation, an attempt to call into question the assumption that deversification could have been responsible for the emergence of such lengthy prose works as the crusading chronicles and the encyclopedic translations of the early thirteenth century. In this volume Beer demonstrates the sophisticated stylistic propensities of Early French prose, an effort long needed that does a great service to all French literary scholars.

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